/ Andrea James / 3:11 pm Mon Dec 6, 2010

Google 404 errors finally getting an update?

google404.jpg For reasons unknown, Google still uses a mid-1990s 404 error, but at least Google Books has a 404 with a literary riff on Twitter's Fail Whale. (via Business Insider)

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  1. For serial? Google’s 404 is light years ahead of your standard mid-90s 404; I mean, it’s got graphics!

  2. Their 404 makes a ton of sense: it’s just basic HTML with some style info thrown in, so even if their image farm takes a bath, they can deliver a sensible error page. And it’s very low bandwidth, so a bad day won’t eat up their bandwidth costs. I hope it doesn’t change.

    1. It is also the case that many of us will attempt to circumvent a problem rather than conclude things are broken forever. Those of us nerdy enough to know what a 404 means can find that information useful. It generally means we’re looking in the wrong place rather than trying to access a page that’s out of commission – temporarily or permanently – for some other reason.

      Give me the choice between an error code and a cute picture with no error code and I’ll pick the error code every time… unless I’m not actually trying to use the site and someone linked me to the cute picture. :)

  3. Personally I wish all of google would go back to the 1990’s interface. Or at least have it as an option. I’m constantly annoyed by the new features they keep adding. The instant search is useless and distracting, wastes bandwidth etc. The thumbnail popup is so annoying I need to move my mouse off the screen and scroll with the keyboard. The fade-in at the beginning, the redundant “everything” sidebar that’s the same as the links at the top.. Give me the old html-only no-frills original google please.

    Oh, and while I’m ranting, the ability to turn off fuzzy search would be great. I don’t want it to correct my spelling, and search for a thousand unrelated derivatives, I don’t want it to drop important terms out of my query, and I don’t want it to add extra terms to my query. At least the ability to turn these things off when you need to would be nice. It’s getting impossible to find specifically what you’re looking for when google thinks it’s being helpful by adding in thousands of unrelated results.

    Cute 404 page though.

    1. “Oh, and while I’m ranting, the ability to turn off fuzzy search would be great.”

      Absolutely!! Them adding fuzzy search marked a dark day for web searching. Even darker was the day they removed wildcard searches. :-(

      It’s worth noting that you can force non-fuzzy searching. Either enclose each word in quotes or add a plus sign before the word. For example, a search for ohhio shows matches on ohio. Search instead for “ohhio” and it will show matches only on the two-h variety.

      1. The * operator still works as a whole-word wildcard (i.e., [the state * ohio] will find “the State of Ohio”, “the State Library of Ohio”, “the State Climatologist for Ohio” and so on.)

  4. Cool down all Anons, give Google the credit for a never-ending job of upgrading the Internet. The 404 is a building block of the web, coding this in a graph is a still a forward move. But the Google journey is not without flops http://wp.me/pQ1Eg-1t9

    1. Not quite.
      Ahab and co. found several non-white whales – in the linked illustration, it appears that the fellow in the longboat is disappointed that he found a whale which isn’t white. (He’s got his pipe with him on the boat, so perhaps it’s Stubb). So this illustration is an appropriate reference – you’ve 404’d, and haven’t found what you’re looking for.

  6. Agree with the comments re fuzzy search. I get the functionality of the 404 page, too, but surely someone there could put an hour against designing something text-only with just a little more flair, and maybe a href link back to their home page. At least unbold the “Google” and update the colors so it’s closer to their redesign.

    1. Perhaps the author of this post should take look at BoingBoing’s own 404 page (HTML 2.0!) before getting too uppity

      Heh. :-)

      Now, there’s a mid-90s 404 page!

  9. Personally, I think their 404 page is perfectly fine. (My only quibble is that I would feature the 404 code a bit more prominently than in just the page title, which is easily overlooked in a tabbed browser.)

    And, no, it’s not a “mid-90s 404 page”: It’s actually more sophisticated than it looks on the surface – it uses style tags *and* table/cell structure with HTML color/font tags, and doesn’t use any backwardly-incompatible HTML 4.01/XHTML constructs, so it not only functions efficiently and attractively on modern style sheet-enabled browsers, it degrades gracefully (and attractively!) on virtually any older and less capable browser, all the way back the TTY-emulator line-mode client.

    It’s whole heckuva lot better than a lot of current 404 pages elsewhere, which not only subject you to the usual raft of ads and navbars and Flash-y bits, but also make you wade through half a page of text speculating about why the page might have been not be found, without ever including either “404” or “Page Not Found”, leaving you to parse out for yourself if this is a 404 or something more exotic.

    It’s an efficient low-bandwidth text-only page that does the job it needs to do, doesn’t clutter things up with extraneous irrelevancies, and works in pretty much any browser ever made.

    Would that all 404 pages were this sophisticated and up-to-date.

  10. It’s a popular lazy sys admin trick to point your proxy / test URLS etc to http://www.google.com or similar, since they spit back the query string regardless of the Host: header. A minor bummer, if they change it.

  12. Once I was trying to use Microsoft’s XBox site. They’d just revamped it and absolutely nothing worked. Their “error” page informed me that their engineers were too busy playing Halo: Reach to make sure everything was working, along with a (functional) link to the Halo: Reach page. I learned something very important that day.

    When my sh*t is not working, I am not in the mood for “cute” error messages. I am in the mood for my sh*t to work.

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